I’d be lying if I told you Arco was an easy breezy game. Don’t let the beautifully bright and vibrant colour palette fool you, this is not a short story. At five hours in and I’m still slinging arrows and getting shot to bits repeatedly through Act Two. Very few of the fights you’ll land yourself in are a walk in the park, requiring multiple attempts and differing strategies, learned from your previous failures. This is no souls-like, which seems to be the new rubric for when a game is hard, but instead a quasi-turn-based-bullet-hell of an adventure in strategy. It’s a wild combination that on paper sounds incompatible, but works amazingly well in practice. Taking your time to dodge incoming projectiles, while also trying to get your attacks in and your magai recharged makes each combat situation a carefully crafted puzzle.
That all being said, I am still stuck in Act Two, I seem to have hit a rather huge difficulty spike. I was faced with multiple projectile firing combatants, each with a lot of health while inside a small room with no environmental boons to lean on. I’ve tried this fight multiple times, I dread to think how many. After a break and a good nights sleep I tried again and this time there was only one guy to take down to proceed! Presumably a patch saved the day, only for me to proceed a bit further on in the story and hit another such spike. As tough as it is, I absolutely adore how Arco plays, with its emphasis on exploration of every nook while riding from screen to screen across the pixelated vistas. Interacting with the wildlife and finding hidden passages as you go, there’s a lot to explore here.
The story that is unfolding through conversations with the locals and the world building that’s being setup is really fantastic. You wont be button mashing through reams of text just to get to the next fight, but short and to the point conversations that genuinely feel important and can provide you with items if handled correctly. You’ll meet characters along your journey who through just one conversation develop their own meaningful backstory and goals. There’s a real tale being told within Arco, set across an earth-like world in what I’m going to very naively call a South America-esque region undergoing pioneering/colonisation by invaders from multiple factions displacing your people through some all too real circumstances. The remarkably small team of four behind Arco’s development have really come together and made something remarkable and emotive here. I just wish I could’ve seen more of the story before release, but by the developers own estimation this is a 15 to 20 hour game. There’s likely a skill gap in my lack of a strategic brain for these sorts of things, so I’m expecting it to be closer to 30 to 40 at my current pace.
Played on PC and Steam Deck.
I’m not going to stop trying to progress in Arco, I am invested. But maybe I need to be less stingy and hire the mercenary I met several towns back for some assistance. Maybe I shouldn’t have spent all of my XP levelling up my attacks so that I could curve arrows and should’ve focused more on increasing my health. Maybe I shouldn’t have fought the possessed skeletal remains I found in a burnt out shack for a dark knife, resulting in having to devour the last of my healing items. Your past actions all lead into the strategy before the next fight even begins. Arco is not a game to be rushed, but absorbed and considered.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
